PGC President Says Online Receives Bulk of Marketing Funds

Parameter Generation & Control (PGC), headquartered in North Carolina, specializes in humidity control chambers and environmental chambers by providing precise relative humidity and temperature control with walk-in rooms, reach-in chambers, and relative humidity generators to serve existing structures.

Recently, PGC President Clay Hile spoke with GlobalSpec about his company’s marketing efforts and how they have changed over the past few years.

GS: Can you describe your target customer and markets?

CH: Our target customer is anybody that requires precise temperature and humidity control. Our biggest segment is the stability market within the pharmaceutical industry. We also market and sell to testing labs, the packaging industry, and the electronics & semiconductor industries.

GS: What does your current marketing mix look like?CH: I’d say for the past few years online marketing has been 70-80% of our mix. That includes GlobalSpec, our own Web site through search engine optimization, e-newsletter ads, paid search ads, and other online channels.

GS: What about on the traditional marketing side?CH: It’s slowly eroding, but we still go to a few trade shows that are hard to give up, even though attendance has fallen off. But we probably do half as many as we used to. Once it was six or seven a year, now it’s three or four. The ones we hold onto are smaller, highly concentrated events.

GS: So some events are still important?CH: Yes, and we’re adding one this year—participating in the Quality Test & Measurement online e-event hosted by GlobalSpec this fall.

GS: Are there any marketing tactics that PGC has completely abandoned?CH: We’ve pulled away from print ads. The return on investment was very low and very difficult to track. Measuring results is very important to us.

GS: Are you able to measure results with online marketing?CH: Yes, when it’s time to renew my GlobalSpec program, it’s easy for me to track what’s happened over the past year: the number of leads, how many of those leads turned into quotes, and how many of those became sales. Of course, it takes a commitment on our end to track leads and sales. With online programs like GlobalSpec, the data is there, and you just have to pay attention to it to determine your return on investment.

GS: What advice would you give other industrial companies that are evaluating their marketing mix?Well, PGC is a relatively small company. And for us, online marketing has leveled the playing field, making it easier to get our information out to people and compete in the market. That wasn’t possible before because, for instance, there was no way a small company like us could buy the back cover color advertisement of a magazine. We were relegated to quarter-page black and white ads—basically unseen. Now, even smaller companies can gain good exposure by investing in online programs.